Cheers sc0ttman!
I downloaded and burned a copy of Beta6 this afternoon. This time around, I've used a 4GB CF card with an ide adapter and loaded Akita onto it via my main work machine (wifi internet) so that once I have all the particular packages and dependencies resolved I can move the card to the kids (non-internet) machine.
I guess I've been blindsighted by something obvious, but can anyone shed some light on my problem please: I want to do a single FULL install on the CF card. Now in Puppies past, I understand that GRUB wasn't required for a FULL install and would boot the (only) Puplet on board the drive. I've already mentioned that I've never had luck in using the Puppy universal installs' option "Internal IDE/SATA Flash Drive (exs: CF card, SD media)" but I thought I'd try it here after sc0ttman's note above about a fix for DISTRO SPECS (?).
Oh yeah - wiped the drive with gparted first, ext3 format for 2.5GB, linux swap 512MB. I guess MBR was wiped too (?)
Anyway, after installing my software+dependencies, rebooted with a standard safe file of 512MB - and some sort of 'gldr not found' error halts all. So I guess that GRUB4DOS is a necessity for this, however -
GRUB4DOS insists on including the parameter "pmedia=usbflash" which isn't healthy for my intended setup. Is that an known error? I also note that several times (e.g., pmount) AKITA insists on calling the ATA SanDisk SDCFB-40 a "floppy". The incorrect icon problem I had before is resolved however, thank you sc0ttman.
So given I want as little/none of the standard GRUB4DOS options showing for the kids as possible (meddling fingers etc) I imagine changing "time" in menu.lst might be the best option. Alternatively, I was thinking of wiping again and doing a full install with an earlier Pupplet where no form of GRUB is required, and just over-write with the equivalent AKITA files (initrd, vmlinuz etc).
I wouldn't normally carp on about such matters, but I note that starhawk is engaged in a very similar project (CF-adapter) and if I can flag any problems he might be having (or solved!) that would be a bonus,
Cheers._________________Toowoomba Linux Community
http://groups.google.com/group/toowoombalinux

My guess is that a CF card is treated like a USB device in all Puppies...

While Akita does indeed use Grub4Dos as its default boot loader, just like shinobars Quicket Puppies, Akita does still allow users to install Akita without using GRUB - using isolinux, or extlinux, etc...

I have installed this way, frugally, to my USB.. No grub in sight..
I do NOT have any experience creating a full install however!

To skip the GRUB screen completely, you edit menu.lst and change the time bit to zero, as you know...
That will skip the boot screen entirely..

Also, menu.lst can be edited to remove the pmedia=usbflash bit, it can be replaced with pmedia=atahd for a normal hard drive... Also, you can click 'e' on the GRUB boot menu to edit a boot entry on a per-boot basis...

And yeah, wiping the drive, as opposed to a particular partition, would also wipe the MBR..

Again, I can't say about the floppy icon issue, but try uncommenting the lines 162-169 (around there anyway...) .. Or you could disable the floppy drives in your BIOS, if you don't use them...

Hope that helps, without more experience with full installs, I can't say - I always use frugal installs, as I tinker a lot and very often don't save my changes._________________Akita Linux, VLC-GTK, Pup Search, Pup File Search

Hey puppyt, I couldn't get the "internal cf" installer to run as I expected either. (hope this isn't going too off-topic...).
If you have a spare mo' could you check my post at
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=71879
I think I ended up with something like a full cf install similar to what you were wanting. Just don't quite know how I got there, but you may be able to interpret my post and pick out some speck of useful info. (I had been wanting multiple frugals on the cf, not a single full install).

Also had the same issues about the cf being seen as a usb device.

I love Akita. (I'm still trying to find a way to permanently modify the live cd so it loads as pfix=ram only. I've achieved it with a different distro, but when I try the same trick on Akita I get grub error 15. I will get there in the end tho')Last edited by greengeek on Mon 16 Jan 2012, 15:04; edited 1 time in total

The Universal Installer does not yet support GRUB, it will always install extlinux or isolinux (depending on where you install to) as the boot loader.. This is fine, because you can then run GRUB installer or Grub4Dos to install grub and replace the MBR with one that uses grub in one fell swoop...

The frugal installer will automatically create a frugal install which uses grub4dos..

And to remaster the ISO with pfix=ram inside menu.lst should be really easy with Woofy... It will tell you before it builds the ISO, and where the contents are the ISO are to be found, so they can be edited before the ISO is actually created..

The problem with dir2pet is that you must always pre-append `rxvt -e` to run it in the console, because the user must answer questions in the console to make a pet file successfully... I have never seen any 'dir2pet' which does not need ask questions, as Don alluded to...

So, here is a dir2pet I hacked up, with a --silent option, which must be given AFTER the pet file...
The script will not ask you anything if you supply the --silent option, example:

Code:

dir2pet "mypet-0.1" --silent

This is good, because people can now use `dir2pet ./mypetstuff --silent` inside other scripts, such as Package Creator, easypackage, etc.. Here's the list of scripts which use dir2pet, I will make the updates as needed for the next beta:

@greengeek
thanks very much for the heads-up on your original post - I've just made a comment there, but for the record I usually use only frugal installs myself and manually edit menu.lst. In this case, I thought that I would try for a Full install as I only have 256MB RAM + 64MB RAM on the Winforce GE2 videocard. Then I thought I'd load up wine and dosbox to provide games the kids are familiar with, but it seems my pup_save has come unstuck between machines (described in earlier post) and "no SDL/OpenGL shall pass". Oh well, looks like I might have to frugal a mini-Akita +FreeDos multiboot...

@sc0ttman
I did manage to do what I thought was a full install + Grub4Dos, but in the menu.lst I had to comment out a strange "UUIDE=...." code as well as a default "dpupish" subdirectory. There was a "ro" code that was added automatically to the kernel line (? from memory), but I couldn't see any syslinux file (reminded to me in greengeek's thread) although extlinux is certainly there.
Alas I couldn't test out your latest joystick-daemon, but I really appreciate your looking into that matter.
There was still a bit of a "ghosting" issue - I had had 3 USB drives connected with my main computer (to install variously-collected puppy files from) and after rebooting in the older machine those drives were still presented (with the default 'cog' image) even though no USB drives were present.
Strangely, in my bigger machine I wasn't able to get the ntfs usb-caddy drive recognised, after installing both (or 3) of the ntfs pets in your repository. Nada on the older machine too...
I'll give more feedback later tonight when I have another chance at that project,
Cheers _________________Toowoomba Linux Community
http://groups.google.com/group/toowoombalinux

Puppyt, maybe try this, it's a slight remix of the puppy universal installer, with simpler GUI options, and, as far as I can tell, a slightly different method of installing drives...

I have added the fixes that I can remember is essential for Akita, and it definitely identified all my drives fine, yet to test much more than that, though.. And it still won't solve any boot-loader troubles, as far as I know...

Cheers sc0ttman!
*egads* re-reading your original post I realise that my test system(s) are probably off the scale of your intended niche, so I thank you very much indeed for all your consideration to my posts. Especially when things have been tight for you.
I couldn't re-test last night as hoped, but I think I will have some energy spare to have another tilt this evening, with your new PUI2. THANKS!
I've been collecting various screenies and log files etc of my explorations with Akita but it's been a bit piecemeal. Didn't want to clutter your thread here but if you're interested, perhaps I could post them on the site I had set up for hondasid's 501 barebones.
Love the "Akita setup" dialogues in your v6 menu structure, by the way! I still can't seem to find a way to review/revise your initial setup dialogues (4-steps) that you have for a system running with pfix=ram. Is it available in the menu?
Cheers!

P.S. For your (and indeed any) Puppy Shutdown menu, would it be feasible [WAAAAY down the track!] to include an "e2fsck on reboot" option? It would save us eternal noobs who can't seem to get the commands working properly from the prompt, when outside of X. Or, is there already such an option (or similar) for automatic recoveries? I remember I think that the grub4dos install wanted to include a "pmedia=usbflash, pfix=fsck" option in menu.lst but it seemed to slow down normal bootups._________________Toowoomba Linux Community
http://groups.google.com/group/toowoombalinux

Note: to get nice icons with Xdialog instead of the X in the titlebar, you can use --wmclass <icon_name-no-suffix>
the icon can be any in jwm's icon path such as /usr/share/{mini-icons,pixmaps}
ex: --wmclass mini-raise
... not to be confused with the --icon parameter which requires a full path and places the icon inside the window with the message text

I have just tried out your download progress bar, but unfortunately, it does not work for me - it stays at 0% until the download is finished, then exits... I am gonna have a look, see if I can learn a bit more about what's going on...

EDIT: scrap that, I got it working! The busybox wget does not work, but it works fine with normal wget and busybox ash...
Awesome, I am gonna try adding this to the PPM, Browser-Installer, Advert-Blocker, and anything I can think of!!

A dropbox thing that could be integrated into a ROX App would be great..
I've read quite a few requests for an easy dropbox upload right click option..

EDIT2: I really like it.. Just i18n'd it as well, French German Spanish Russian Dutch...
using your method from jwm_menu_create...

Downloading the beta6 ISO so that I can futz around on the thin client, see how well it works...

Two things concern me right off the bat:
(1) planning on a full install... is that likely to cause any problems?
(2) hope there's a WPA-compatible driver in there for my RTL-8188 based wifi card... if not, I won't be able to test the internet-based portions of things.

Also... would the "frugal install with save on root of drive (not a file)" thingy work on Akita, or bomb completely like every other version of Puppy I've seen with that option...?_________________

EDIT2: I really like it.. Just i18n'd it as well, French German Spanish Russian Dutch...
using your method from jwm_menu_create...

Thanks, I often forget about internationalization while trying to get it to "just work" (I guess that is why the localization teams exist in various projects - apparently I am not the only one)
... the wget and curl progress bars are quite annoying to work with... I may have anoter look at the busybox wget to make it compatible, but wget and curl are a PITA to grok into a gui - the busybox wget was particularly stubborn, so it may be easier to patch the source to check progress every 1 second, and if progress increased, then printf("%s\n",progress);

I haven't gotten to test akita in a while, ( still working on my ultra-minimalist stuff with goingnuts, - yes we are zealots ) but just looking at the changelog, it seems that you are making a lot of excellent progress (some of which I may eventually borrow)_________________Web Programming - Pet Packaging 100 & 101

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